Man Storms Off Internet: Goodbye, Chris Jones!

Esquire writer Chris
Jones
has killed his blog. This was the last straw for him:
a Tumblr post by Deadspin writer Jack Dickey, who put
side-by-side excerpts of pieces on Robert Caro by Jones and by
Charles McGrath—with the headline “Guess Which One Of These Guys
Was Pissy About Not Winning A National Magazine Award?” Last straws
are funny things.

“Of course, it’s a jab at the post I wrote here about my
disappointment about not getting nominated for an Ellie for my
Roger Ebert profile. Of everything I’ve written here, nothing has
haunted me more. It’s been more than a year, and someone still
makes a reference to it at least once a week,” Jones writes. “I was
honest about my disappointment, because every writer I know suffers
disappointments, and we’re supposed to be honest, and we’re all in
this together.” This is true! He was honest about his
disappointment. That honesty, and its expression, was off-putting.
“I’ve always kept score,” he wrote back then. Does anyone like a
person who’s told you that he’s keeping score?

The thing that’s frustrating about Jones is that he’s a
universalizer; he doesn’t understand that some of us think it’s
actually bad to keep score. (His recent terribly offputting
thing about
how women didn’t sex him right was another example of how the
internal monologue sometimes doesn’t express well publicly. It was
gross and crude and unlikeable. It was another way in which Chris
Jones smells like a bully—even though he hasn’t even done any
actual bullying! Except… when
he has.)

So once you tell everyone that you’re keeping score, that you’re
in this as a competition, well, then we all know that you’re on
your own side, and many of us then have no interest in
extending any camaraderie to you. You’re just another Tracy Flick,
at best. You’re out for you.

That he wrote about taking “a rapid-fire bolt through the stages
of grief” over not being nominated for an award is, in a way, an
admirable thing to admit. It’s a good thing for us to know about
you. It’s also an overt declaration that we’re not on the same
team. Shutting down a blog is also another specific kind of
personality expression. “It’s just not worth it” is the explanation
of a child who feels he’s been misunderstood. That seems like the
summation of a failure of the use of words.

Thousands of writers blog without feeling they had to take down
everything they’ve written. But some do have to. So goodbye, Chris
Jones’ blog. You were a venue that allowed Chris Jones to do a
disservice to himself, and so it’s time for you to go.

Update: He’s since deleted his farewell post; it can be
found here and
here in two
screenshotted parts.